Ask audiovisual enthusiasts what the best set top box for their bucks is, and they’ll usually answer, visibly panting, “Popcorn Hour.” The Popcorn Hour C-200 can handle pretty much every video codec under the sun, prominently features a built-in Bittorrent client, and you can even plug in a Blu-Ray drive.

The downsides of the Popcorn Hour C-200 were major, though: it was roughly the size of a 1970’s era stereo receiver, had a terrible interface and cost about $300, which is twice the standard price of the competition. But Popcorn Hour manufacturer Syabas has virtually eliminated all of these complaints in their followup to the C-200, with a far snappier product name: meet the Popbox.

The Popbox keeps the C-200’s world class codec support, but shrinks the package down to match the size of the competition. They’ve substantially improved the interface, with animation, automatic IMDB and AllMusic parsing, while integrating a lot of online video content channels that the C-200 was previously missing, including Netflix, Facebook, Twitter and MLB.

In short, it looks fantastic, but the Popbox does lose a few things compared to its predecessor. The big one is Bittorrent support, which was a fantastic boon for hardcore audio-visual nerds, although since the Popbox is open source, presumably someone can add it right back in. Additionally, it ditches the internal hard drive bay.

Those are minor drawbacks, though, especially given the Popbox’s incredible new price: it’s dropped from $300 to $130, well in line with the competition. It will be unveiled officially at CES on January 5th.